Digital video and audio capabilities can be incorporated into a wide range of devices, including digital televisions, digital direct broadcast systems, wireless broadcast systems, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop or desktop computers, digital cameras, digital recording devices, digital media players, video gaming devices, video game consoles, cellular or satellite radio telephones, video teleconferencing devices, and the like. Digital video and audio devices implement video and audio compression techniques, such as those described in the standards defined by Moving Picture Experts Group-2 (MPEG-2), MPEG-4, International Telegraph Union-Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) H.263, ITU-T H.264/MPEG-4, Part 10, Advanced Video Coding (AVC), the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, and extensions of such standards. The video and audio devices may transmit, receive, encode, decode, and/or store digital video and audio information more efficiently by implementing such video and audio coding techniques.
Video and audio coding standards, such as Scalable HEVC (SHVC) and Multiview HEVC (MV-HEVC), provide level definitions for defining decoder capability. In the following, the issues and solutions are described based on the existing level definition and other contexts of SHVC at the time when the invention was made, but the solutions apply to MV-HEVC, and other multi-layer codecs as well.